Edit to Tape upsetting Harris DL860 legalizer

Since upgrading to FCP7 our Kona 3 in Edit to Tape mode is now seriously unsettling our Harris DL860 legalizer.

When the Edit to Tape window is opened around half the time the DL860 locks up and displays 'unknown format' on the screen. The units controls no longer work, and it requires a reboot.
Also sometimes the Harris just reboots when edit to tape is opened, and sometimes it reboots when edit to tape is closed.

On a busy day the Harris is now being rebooted up to 30 times.

I've always found the SDI output signal from FCP when the edit to tape window is opened to be rather nasty, and our monitors and decks don't like locking to it. But it appears to have gotten worse with FCP7.

This is with SD ref to all devices from a GEN10 (except the Harris, doesn't do ref) and it doesn't make any difference whether the output of the deck is patched back into the input of the AJA.

This has been covered before but, edit to tape is basically going in to capture mode, meaning the input of the Kona is now open. When this happens, the Kona references incoming video as it always does on capture. So, if you feed stable black in the same format your timeline is in, you will be feeding the Kona the reference it's looking for. When laying off to SR this can be a challenge becuase if the deck sees that dirty signal, it will freak out and force a restart of the machine, just like your legalizer. I wish AJA would make a multiformat black generator just for fcp ett situations just like this.

What you have to understand is that when you open the Edit to Tape window, the card is actually in CAPTURE mode, not output mode. The reason for this is so that if you are cueing and marking in on the tape using the FCP controls, you can see and hear the picture and track the tc on the tape itself, so the Kona has to produce the incoming video from the output of the deck. It is not until the actual ETT starts that the card goes in to output mode and then the Kona looks for external reference.

When the card is in capture mode, the Kona (and Blackmagic cards) locks on to the incoming signal...always. You can try this yourself by opening the ETT mode and have the Control Panel visible at all times. You will see the Kona Ref in switch from whatever it's set to (say Genlock: Ref In), to Genlock: SDI 1 (or whatever your incoming video port is set to). Now, if you have no video coming in to the KOna card, or a mismatch in settings from the frame buffer to the incoming video, the Kona will show exactly what Piers is talking about, a bunch of green hash. This will freak out the legalizer and even SR decks. If you send stable black to the DIGITAL VIDEO signal (meaning it needs to be HD/SD SDI, not composite sync) the Kona will reference that clean balck signal and will you not get the green hashish.

Now, that source can be from anywhere, it can be from the deck itself, but the deck has to be out of E-E, it can also be from another source such as another capture card/computer or any other SDI device that has a signal that matches your frame buffer. A small inline black generator that you would be able to patch in to your Kona would alleviate this.

I have had the same behavior with our Harris legalizer. One trick that seems to calm the box down is making sure that your base setting of the kona card is the same flavor of video you are laying back. We are on an Xsan and the users we log into do not have root permissions. This can cause the kona to revert to a different set of settings when you open edit to tape. By logging in under a different user I can set the kona to "Stick" and then the legalizer craps out less. There needs to be a hardware fix or something because having to reset the legalizer every time you have to insert sucks. It is really bad if you are laying back 24p.